Tarsem may have originally envisioned Immortals as an anachronistic take on Greek mythology akin to Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, but playing in the mainstream studio sandbox meant making some concessions. Still, the resulting period fantasy actioner is a visual marvel, starring Henry Cavill as a human Theseus battling the evil king Hyperion (Mickey Rourke) in a struggle for the fate of humanity and the gods, and Tarsem clearly relished (and handily fulfilled) the challenge of one-upping the similar-on-paper stylings of 300.
Movieline sat for a chat in Los Angeles with Tarsem to discuss his honey badger status, the fact that Greek scholars may raise their eyebrows at Immortals, why 300's "cheap" visual style is so 18 years ago, and how the race to get his kid-oriented Snow White project out ahead of competitor Snow White and the Huntsman meant scrapping 3-D to be the first one out of the gate.
I saw you earlier this year bringing Immortals to WonderCon...
Where you there at the one in San Francisco, WonderCon? That was the one where they told me, "You need to go to training school."
I remember the t-shirt you made that said, "I've been media trained!"
Yes! I said I'll go if I can wear this shirt. But nobody asked me to take off my coat. Because you know what it said on the back? In the front it said "I've been media trained," and in the back it said, "Fuck off." But nobody took a picture! That would reflect me, so they said, "Okay, you can do it -- but go for the media class."
After that, I described you as the honey badger of film directors.
You're the girl! That's everywhere! Everybody sends it to me, thank you so much! I had about a million of them everywhere. Thank you!
It was my pleasure. But I'm curious to know; what is your attitude and approach to doing all this media, of putting yourself out there and yet having to temper what you say to a degree?
If I had to control what I was speaking, it would be a chore. Right now I just feel I've got my shoes off, everybody comes in, I talk. If I was an actor it could be a problem, but right now I just talk all the crap, I can badmouth anybody I want, I can say what I want and move on. I don't have to put on a front. If I had to, it would be difficult and tiring. It ain't; I'm just meeting people and telling them what the process was, so it's not like pulling teeth. It's absolutely fine.
It can't be like that for most directors, though.
It isn't because they get media trained. [Laughs] Or something happens where... I know right now I get the call every now and then when they say, "Everything's okay - but lay off saying the word 'gay.'" And I said, really? Why? Some of my best supporters are that! They say, "Well, they might take it out of context," and I'm used to that. They always take my stuff and make it sound horrendous. And if they quote the whole thing they'll know that I just don't take any of this seriously.
It's interesting to discuss this on the occasion of Immortals, because Immortals is your most mainstream work to date. You're this indie maverick. This is a big studio movie.
But at the same time, anybody who knows me knows I'm there through and through in [the film]. So I just went in and said... there's only that would have been a problem and I wouldn't have done any of the press, I would have gone out of my way to bury everybody with it, when they had a chat about how, if possible, they could make this movie PG. And I just said, you'd have a ten-minute movie and a really mad guy who will kill everybody who comes in. Slowly they talked themselves out of it, and finally when it was finished they screened it for the kids. There are different sides to me; I wanted to make a personal film but I would not want to make any film that does not reflect me in it. At least, not right now. I'm just too young to be doing that.
Do you mean PG-13? The idea of working with a PG or PG-13 rating... [Immortals is rated R.]
I love that! But for me, when they asked me on the PG-13 movie that I'm making [Mirror, Mirror], "Do you want to make it edgy?" No! Because when I make it edgy, nobody's going to see it. I love the idea of making a movie for kids but it's got to be that, with my take on it. And "edgy" is such a bad term. I kept telling them "edgy" is usually what people do when they make ads and they couldn't get the job, you would say, "I'll make it more edgy." I'm thinking, edgy for who? Edgy for me? For Disney? For Gaspar Noe? Do you want a rape scene, what do you want? So I said, no, it's a kid family movie. I want to make that. And they said, "Great," and left me alone.
Just like that?
It really helped that I had someone like Julia [Roberts] on my side, she was like, "Stay away!"
Her director on Fireflies in the Garden also recently credited her with championing the project with it seeing the light of day.
Oh, I tell you what, she's really supportive. She was really, really good for that. And this one , it is a bit more commercial just because action tends to be commercial for today's audiences when you're spending $100 million bucks, it's freaky when something doesn't have action and does that well. I like to do action, but what I didn't want to do was half-assed action. So when I go there, you might want to pull people in by saying, "From the producers of 300," which is the problem we were having originally when the effects weren't done and they were trying to get input from people. People would look at it and say, "This looks so cheap, it doesn't look anything like 300"... and finally when we finished it they said, "Why are you selling it as a [similar film to 300], it's so much bigger!" I said, whatever it takes to bring people in. But when they see it, you can see it's not a comic movie. It's actually got a completely different sense of realism to it.
It's interesting that the effects work made that much of a difference, given that you have great props and costumes and sets as it is.
It made a massive difference. The technology of the speeding up and slowing down, that's just one of the cheapest things you can do. That's all they did in [300]. It's something I was doing 18 years ago. But then you see it now, and McDonald's was doing it 10 years ago, it wasn't a hip thing. When they used it in 300 it was fantastic in the movie but it was a one-trick pony.
And post-300, it's so passé.
Very badly so. I hate the idea that everything just speeds up and slows down. I wanted to use the license with the gods, because when a god moves he's so much faster than a human that he can barely move and he could decapitate 30 of them. When the gods fight with each other they can all move at the same speed, but when they kill each other that guy's body slows down to human level. That's why it was really technically difficult that when you kill somebody their body slows down, but you're still moving fast. So what do you do with this body? You can't get it out of the way while somebody else attacks you. That became difficult to choreograph.
It's complicated to even think about how you went about coordinating those multiple speeds in the same frame.
It was very tough, but I love it. That's what I think they pay me for. And you know what? It's not a cheap thing to do. Like the thing in 300, anybody could do that -- that's why Meet the Spartans came out like two months after 300. It's very cheap to do that effect, but this effect is very complicated to do.
That's just one of the many striking visual moments in the film, along with --
Blasting people's heads! [Laughs] They asked me, "Do you have to have that many headshots in there?" I said, "Yes!" They kind of hit some people in the bodies but then he just knocks the heads off!
The bloodlust in Immortals should satisfy a certain audience going in for the action, but there's also the mythology in your story. This is a Theseus adventure, but it's not exactly as it happens in Greek mythology that we've all read.
Not at all. Because if you go with that, those are worth about a ten-minute film. Or an art house film. When you're making something big like this -- gods and Theseus have nothing to do with each other, Theseus's story is a different tale altogether -- so once we mixed it I just said, no, no, no. Do we really have to call him Theseus? It was going to be a post-apocalyptic film, I was going to make this much like [Baz Luhrmann's] Romeo + Juliet in Mexico. It was going to be with a rector city, the Renaissance. We started from that and they said, no -- people right now want to see these things, can't you just pretend it's Greek? I didn't want Hyperion's name. I was going to put an Indian bad guy in there...
Right -- because using these familiar names certainly invokes people's prior knowledge, and that could be confusing.
It does, and it's a plus and a minus. Plus because people think that's Greek mythology and they'll show up. On the other hand, the two people who've read a little bit of Greek mythology will go, "Wait a minute -- why is...?" And I'm just thinking, there's nothing that makes sense in here. It's just a backdrop.
Your Snow White film [now retitled Mirror, Mirror] will also come out with a cinematic doppelganger of sorts, since there's a competing Snow White movie also in the works.
But we are so ahead of them that it kind of makes no difference for me. It's the one that's always second that can be difficult, and I wish them the best of luck. They can afford to be second; we couldn't be. We just couldn't be. Because their budget is much bigger and they're going for a particular thing. I just said no, as a family film, we cannot be second. So kill the 3-D and we finish it first, and that's exactly what we did.
What appealed to you about making a Snow White movie to begin with?
I have a lot of interest, but I did not want to make a queen, again like the gods, that would turn cauldrons and say, "What are the humans up to?" I just don't like the idea of the queen going into a mirror and talking. She goes into the mirror and she walks into a different landscape, she arrives in a completely different place and speaks to herself! She's like a split personality person, doing all the evil she needs to do but yet can blame somebody else for it. So I said if I can get those pieces in, I'm interested in making this.
We've seen relatively little from the film this early out, but I must say the moment I was most intrigued was when I saw Lily Collins' ballroom look.
[Laughs] You know what? That's the best part that I would expect somebody like you to bring up, but on the other hand other people are like, "Why does she have that swan on her head??" I'm like, it's out of context. It's a costume ball and she's wearing the thing, and she looks gorgeous in it!
Shades of Bjork! I'm there.
Swan head!